DIARY: To Love Thyself

     It seems like the hardest thing to do for me so far is not to fall in love again, nor to get over a love that's dead, but to love myself as much as my own self loves me. It sounds crazy, does it? It is true that our selves love us, and that, it is us who find it hard to love ourselves. I have been in this constant battle for a year now. I can't believe that even a confident and prideful woman like me... would fall victim to this ugly monster. I am a hypocrite when I write this entry with such righteousness but will lie in bed later tonight hating every inch of myself more than anyone who has ever hated me.

     It's a journey, I believe. A journey of convincing myself to love my self. A constant debate between my emotional mind and my sane being. This is the result of many friendships broken and a love I could not save. There must be some kind of explanation for this, mustn't there? But I really don't have any. I don't even know what questions need answers let alone the questions to ask.

     All I know, though, is that my self loves me. All that is biological and spiritual about me... loves me. Being a health science major, I am very thankful to have studied the human body. I understand the physicality that makes us mortal. The anatomy and physiology... all of that. When I fracture a bone, it heals the injured area by filling itself with blood. The healing process goes from there. The amazing thing about a bone healing is that it forms a callous. The area grows a tad bit thicker than your bones. This is so you don't break in that same area ever again, and you won't. It gains resistance and strength... all because it was injured. When I go to the gym and beat myself up working out and lifting weights, isn't it a universal and well-known fact that when I tear a muscle it grows stronger and bigger? It is my body responding to pain and injury. When I hurt my body that way, my body combats that by strengthening itself more than it ever has before. When I bleed from a cut, my blood helps by clotting it. It stops my body from losing more blood. When I am sick, my immune system helps fight off whatever that's causing me ill. My body is constantly keeping me alive. It's constantly healing me. It's constantly making me better. So why is it that I forget about these things in the face of someone who looks better than me? Whose eye, lip, and nose placement is just a bit different than mine? Whose body just do not have enough adipose tissue (fat) than I do? Whose eye, hair, and skin color, are just a different shade of melanin? Why do those matter when, in an anatomical and physiological level, we are just the same? It's because it is all about acceptance and understanding of one's self. You will meet groups of people who look different from one another... but accept and understand themselves differently. It is all about that. And when you understand that your body, or anyone's body for that matter, loves the soul that lives in it... I hope that the soul it has welcomed since the day it was out of its mother's womb... will come to love its body, its home, just as much.

     Did I just write that? I feel better. I think my soul is coming to love its home, too.